2 Answers

0 votes

Best answer

There is absolutely no way to know this for sure. It is a case of the age-old paradox: which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I will start with whether they can only say their name, since that is easier. It is not always the case, although it usually is. Meowth from Team Rocket is the only known example of a Pokemon that has actually taught itself to speak human (that I can think of). Many Psychic types, legendaries, and a few others, seem to be able to communicate via telepathy instead. I can recall Mewtwo, Lapras, Shaymin, Jirachi, and various other Pokemon "talking" in this way.

Now I will move onto how they were named. Logically it makes no sense for Pokemon to only be able to say what the humans named them, meaning that they were probably named after the sounds they made. This then raises the question of how Pokemon like Charizard or Onix, which really only roar, were named. But this is just a theory, because as I said at the start there is no way to know for sure.

I imagined that when someone first saw a pokemon
"Oh look! It's a lizard with its tail on fire! I'll call it a Charmander! Hi charmander!" and then lots of people passed the charmander and said
"hi charmander"
"hello, you charmander"
"how are you charmander"
And then the Charmander copied what he was called. Like how parrots copy speech. And then when he kept saying Charmander it rubbed off others and all Charmanders said "charmander".
That's just my theory, though.

Building off of MeloettaMelody's answer, Pokemon like Charizard and Onix, and others, like Krabby, are actually saying their Japanese names, and not just roaring. Its admittedly a bit of a stretch, but next time you watch the anime, listen closely to Charizard, and you can hear it saying "Lizardon", albeit very slurred. And now getting to the answer. Some of these names are very obscure if you don't know Japanese (Iwark for Onix makes zero sense to me, but I don't know Japanese, so it may be just a clever name for a rock snake), so maybe at some point somebody just said "These names make no sense, lets change em!", and they did.

I know this question has been sufficently answered already, but I just wanted to add my two cents.